Scars
by asmallthing
Summary: This is a sequel to my other story, Small Things. You need to read that first. This takes place between that one and movies.
1. Chapter 1

**This is my new story. It's a sequel to Small Things and you really have to read that first! It takes place between that and the movies. **

**I hope you like it and I REALLY hope you leave a review. There's not a lot of traffic in this community so I'd love to hear each reader's opinion! **

"How'd you get this scar?" he asked, lightly running his thumb along the thin white line spanning almost the entire length of her inner right forearm. He'd seen it dozens of times; she made no effort to cover or hide any of the scars scattered across her body, but it caught his attention today and he asked about it for the first time.

"Her eyes met his, searching them for some meaning hidden behind the sudden question. She saw nothing other than simple curiosity and although it twisted the invisible knife that she carried lodged deeply in her heart to do it, she answered the question as he'd asked it, simply stating the facts.

"I went through a stained-glass window in Barcelona."

He knew that she was telling the truth. Her answer had been direct and there was not a hint of dishonesty in her response. But he also recognized that she was withholding something from him. He saw the hesitation that came before her answer and the pain in her eyes as she'd spoken was as evident as the truth that she was telling.

"Why?"

His eyes hadn't left hers since he'd asked the first question and although his tone of voice remained gentle, she understood that he was asking her for what she'd left unsaid. He wanted to know why she'd hesitated. He knew she was hiding something from him and that whatever it was was intensely painful for her and he was still requiring an answer from her.

She wasn't ready for this.

She had expected questions from him, about his past, but as the months had passed and they never came, she had grown accustomed to this new relationship with Jason. He seemed oddly content with the gaps that he had to recognize were there, in his memory. She'd never hinted about their past to him. She was afraid of how much it would hurt her to press him for those precious memories of them that he no longer had. And she was outright terrified of what it might do to him to realize the enormity of what had been lost to him. But most of all she knew that if he ever discovered the reason that had prompted him to voluntarily walk in to that building that she'd lose him again and she'd decided to hide it from him at all costs.

If and when the questions finally came, she'd answer them factually, truthfully, but she'd keep their relationship a secret from him. She was determined that he'd get no chance to walk away from her again. She would not allow him to discover the reasons he had turned himself over to them for retraining. Those dangerous memories belonged only to her now. He'd thrown them away when he'd made the terrible choice; not once, but twice, to leave her.

* * *

They'd been together for a few months. But their time together was so precious and so scarce that they'd not had much of a chance to talk. It had begun with an evening flight to Naples followed by a single night in a hotel before an early-morning rendezvous with a local contact. She'd returned to Paris immediately following the meeting while he stayed to complete the assignment.

It had been the first time he'd been alone with her outside of the confines of the office since he'd returned and he hadn't been able to resist the feelings that he had for her.

He'd recognized how risky their encounter had been and she had still been fighting the temptation to restart a relationship with him so they'd each decided, separately, that it could not happen again.

But then he'd come back from the mission. And neither of them could deny the pull that they both felt when he sat in her office for the debriefing. He was careful, waiting almost a whole week before slipping into her apartment in the dark of night and back out again before dawn.

Almost all of their time together was closely monitored and they dared not say or do anything that would betray their relationship while under the watchful eyes of Treadstone but they were each adept at reading the other's face, sensing the meanings hidden behind the innocuous words that they traded in front of other people, and Jason knew that his simple question had rocked the usually steady Nicky. He just didn't know why.

* * *

He waited for an answer that he slowly realized wasn't coming. What was it about his question that upset her so? Her face had fallen, not when he'd asked the question, but when she'd failed to find whatever it was that she was looking for in his eyes. _What had she been hoping to see so badly? What had he failed to give her? _

The silence stretched out between them.

"I should remember." He spoke softly but with certainty. "There are gaps… things I _know_ I should remember… that I don't." His words tipped the tears that had been pooling in her eyes down her cheeks and he knew he was right.

"I'm sorry." He whispered. She didn't answer, couldn't really.

"I... was there" his words came out as more of a question than a statement despite his feeling of near certainty that he was right.

When she finally spoke her words confirmed his belief. "We went through that window together." She looked away from him as she spoke, her eyes losing focus slightly, remembering. "You wrapped your body around mine and threw us both out that window. My arm caught a shard of glass on the way out, but you saved my life."

"Why don't I remember?" He looked at her and saw the pity that was etched in her face as she answered his question. "They took you to New York... for retraining." She reached for his hands. "I.. I don't know what they did to you, but you were gone for six months and when you came back, you didn't remember _anything. _It was like you were meeting me for the first time. They told us... we should behave like you were new to the program... you weren't the first to go through that and I knew what to expect, how to act, but it was... difficult.. for me."

She braced herself for the next question. He'd ask her why. He'd ask her why he had had his memory wiped and she knew that he wouldn't miss the lie that she was determined to tell him. But he didn't ask.

Instead, he returned to the scar on her arm. "Why? Why did we jump through a window?"

She took a deep breath. _You can do this. This is the easy part. Just stick to the facts exactly like you planned, and you'll get through it. _"We were running from a Serbian agent trying to kill us… well, me. But we got away and we made it to a hotel room." He interrupted her. "Why was he trying to kill you?" This little piece of information worried him. He had always thought Nicky perfectly safe when he left her each time for one of his assignments and it was jarring to realize that, maybe, he had been wrong; that her job was more dangerous than he realized.

"I had just completed an assignment in Belgrade, with another agent, and I hadn't had time to go home before they sent me to Barcelona to set things up for you. I didn't realize that the file I had downloaded contained a tracker virus. As soon as I opened it, it activated." She was still frustrated at herself for failing to detect the virus. She had run it through the software on her laptop and although it had come back without any evidence of malicious programming, she still should have waited until she was back in the office and had the IT guys take a look at it before she opened it. But she'd wanted to stay in Spain with Jason and had decided to risk it.

"They found you." he prompted when he realized that she'd gotten caught up in a memory.

"No." She corrected, "They found you. I was staying in a hotel and had already left to check in but I'd accessed the program in the apartment that you were stationed in and that's where he went looking for me. You killed him and then you called me. We met outside at a cafe... and they found us again."

* * *

She had cursed her stupidity in opening the file and had been relieved to find Jason unharmed when she sat down across the table from him. It hadn't occurred to her to tell him about her time in Belgrade or the file that she'd accessed in the apartment. The two of them had always maintained a purely professional relationship despite their evident interest in each other and she hadn't had a professional reason to talk to him about her work with another agent. The surprise attack he'd just endured at the apartment could have been avoided had she just opened up to him, but she knew that the real fault lay in her desire to stay with him in Spain. She should have gone home but the ridiculous little crush she had developed had caused her to linger and led to a mistake that had almost cost him his life.

She filled him on what happened. She'd copied the file onto a secure hard drive and deleted the active program as soon as Jason had called her then she'd packed up all her stuff and run out the door.

She never saw the agent following her. But Jason did. He'd yanked her around the corner and they'd run, finding a church with an open door just a block away. The agent followed them in to the darkened church.

Jason and Nicky kept close to the wall, dropping low to hide behind the pews. They slipped quietly around the corner and into the transept just as he caught up to them. It was a dead end; he had them cornered.

"Give me the file." His gun was directed at Nicky but he kept his eyes on Jason, who he recognized as a threat. Jason's gun was trained on him, ready to put a bullet in his brain the second he made a move toward Nicky. "Put the bag down and back away, Nicky." he ordered her.

She hesitated. This file was important, much more important than they'd initially thought. They wouldn't have put so much effort into getting it back it if it wasn't and she didn't want to lose it. She clutched the bag she'd packed in her hotel room more tightly.

"Nicky..." Jason spoke quietly, but the warning was clear in his tone. He needed her to back away from the other agent. If she would cooperate, distance herself from the guy, he'd be able to take him out safely. She heeded his warning and reached for the strap holding the bag across her shoulders but before she could lift it over her head someone burst through the door of the church and when the agent turned Jason took his shot, dropping him. Then he wrapped himself around her body and threw them out the window.

They hit the ground hard, but Jason was up and running, half carrying the stunned Nicky, before the second attacker could make his way to the window.

* * *

Nicky paused her story. She'd answered his question and prayed that he'd be satisfied without hearing the rest of the story but he motioned for her to continue.

"We made it to a hotel room and called it in and the extraction team gave us orders to sit tight while they dealt with the target, but..."

"There was so much blood." Jason whispered. A half-remembered image floating to the surface of his mind. "You needed stitches. We couldn't wait."

_He can't remember this._ Nicky felt the delicate stirrings of hope deep in her chest and it scared her. She knew that what she hoped for so desperately wasn't possible and she had learned to quickly push those feelings back down before they had a chance to grow into something that was too big for her to control. Something with the power to hurt her. But Jason continued speaking, feeding that feeling, and this time she couldn't stop it.

"You had a med kit in your bag." He pulled her arm towards him as he sat facing her, subconsciously recreating the position that they had taken as he'd stitched up her injury that afternoon in the hotel room. Then he was silent for a moment as he struggled to remember.

"Twenty-three". He didn't offer any explanation for the number but looked at her for confirmation. She nodded. _He does remember _her mind stubbornly insisted, even as she struggled to squelch that dangerous thought. "I put twenty-three stitches into your arm, with no Lidocaine, and you never made a sound." He bent down and kissed the scar gently and her mind spun. He'd done the same thing when he'd finished sewing up the wound two years ago. He'd bandaged it and then… he'd kissed it.

That had been the beginning of it all, for them. It was the first time they'd broken through the strictly professional boundaries of their relationship. It was a small thing, that gesture, but its meaning had been profound.

And he remembered. Somehow, impossibly, he'd remembered them.

**Alright. Let me have it. Reviews! I'll add some more to their story once I get some... :)**


	2. Chapter 2

**Thanks for the review! I hope you enjoy chapter 2! I've pretty much settled on telling their back story as a series of flashbacks/memories each triggered by a different scar that Jason asks her about so each chapter will focus one event/scar. Kinda morbid? But I think it'll work. **

"I remember this one." he said, gently caressing the bullet wound on the back of her left shoulder.

Jason was sitting up in bed with Nicky laying sideways across it with her head resting on his lap. The sheet covered her lower half but left her back and shoulders exposed to his view.

She thanked god that she was laying on her stomach with her face turned away from him when he softly voiced that statement. His tone was confident, more so than the other times he'd shared a half-remembered event with her, but she _knew_ that he didn't fully remember. Every little reminder of the memories that he had lost was excruciating.

She schooled her face, as best as she could, into the nonchalant mask that she'd perfected and rolled over to face him before she spoke. "No. You don't."

The matter-of-fact tone with which she contradicted him was unexpected. He _did_ remember it- at least he'd gotten a small flash; a fragment of a memory.

* * *

_He'd frantically rolled her over onto her side, cutting through her shirt to expose the exit wound he knew was there, desperately hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as he expected and relief had flooded though him at the sight of the wound. It had been a through-and-through. The exit was clean and smaller than he had any right to expect. Blood welled up, pouring out of the hole, but it wasn't arterial. _

_It was survivable._

* * *

"I do." he insisted. But even as he spoke, he shook his head in frustration. "I remember... looking at it and... realizing that... that you weren't going to die."

This was torture for her. The things he could remember they weren't the _important_ things. He only remembered the bad stuff. He'd never recovered any of the sweet moments that they'd spent sharing a drink overlooking the city from the balcony of a hotel in Prague, swimming late at night in the Mediterranean Sea, making plans while intertwined in a bed in Kiev. All he could remember were the darkest parts and she wanted to scream at the unfairness of it all.

But, instead of screaming, she sat up, nestled herself between his legs, and leaned back against his chest. She was so much shorter than he was that when she leaned her head against the right side of his face, he could almost rest his chin on top of her head. As his arms encircled her lovingly she lifted his left hand to touch the scar that the bullet had left as it penetrated the front of her left shoulder, just below the collarbone.

"You _don't_ remember it. Not really. That bullet went right through me..." she paused, leaning forward slightly and twisting to face him. Then she guided his hand to the small scar situated directly over his own heart. "But it was meant for you."

Her statement left him reeling. He'd never given much thought to the scars on his own body. He had analyzed them in a detached sort of way, mentally categorizing them by type and severity but not bothering too much over the unanswerable mystery of how he'd earned each one. How could it be possible that he could remember, so very vividly, that one small flash of a memory of Nicky's injury and have absolutely no recall of his own?

As she had done so many times before, the words she spoke echoed his own thoughts. "How can you say you remember... when you can't even remember what happened to you?" she asked him. He had no answer to her question and although it hurt her, terribly, to do it, she began, once again, to explain.

"We were here, in Paris, when it happened.

* * *

Nicky could barely contain her anxiety as she walked towards Jason's apartment. He'd been gone longer than usual this time and it had been almost three months since she'd last seen him. She could hardly count that debriefing conference that they'd had yesterday as quality time. He'd answered her questions with his usual professionalism and nothing he'd said indicated that anything unusual had happened during his time in Moscow. But Nicky, who knew him better than anyone else, recognized that his answers were a carefully crafted deception. He had been lying; not to her, but to Treadstone. He had something to hide and she needed to know what it was.

And he had been so _tired._ She noted the circles under his eyes and detected a slight sluggishness to his movements that was totally at odds with his usual gracefulness. She was worried about him so she had deliberately left out a few crucial questions during the interview, necessitating this little after hours meeting.

She was still puzzling over what could possibly have happened to him in Moscow that he'd have needed to hide from Treadstone as she reached the keypad that unlocked the main entrance to his apartment building. She hadn't noticed the dark figure that had slipped out of the car parked a few spaces back from hers and followed her towards the doorway. But Jason had taught her well and she instinctively did a quick scan of the sidewalk in both directions and finding it empty, she glanced at the dim reflection in the glass doorway in front of her before she entered the code.

And she saw him. She saw him and she knew that something was wrong. He was wrong. There was something about this guy that just felt _wrong._ In that split second sight of him reflected in the glass she recognized it intuitively. Had she been asked to explain it, she may not have been to articulate the reasons but he was too close, his clothes were too dark, his steps too quiet, his stance too rigid. He didn't belong here. She rapidly entered the eight digit code and when the lock clicked open, she slipped in as quickly as possible.

She almost made it.

He caught the door just before she could slam it closed behind her and he forced his body through the small opening. He grabbed her upper arm with his left hand and slammed her into the wall, pressing a gun against the center of her chest.

She knew that she should be afraid but her mind remained oddly calm and when he spoke to her, she detected the barest trace of a Russian accent that tainted his speech. "Which apartment is he in?" the man demanded of her. Her gaze didn't waver as she looked him straight in the eye and refused to answer. His only response was to pull back the hammer of the gun, that small sound echoing loudly in the empty foyer, and redirect it from her heart to her elbow. He'd shoot her, not to kill, just to cause her enough pain that she'd give him the answer he wanted. The gun he threatened her with was equipped with a silencer so he wasn't afraid of Jason, or anyone else, hearing the gun shot and she fully believed he'd carry out his threat.

Her heart was pounding in her chest but she knew that she needed to delay him as long as possible so she whimpered in fear and cried out "Please, don't, don't. I.. I'll take you to him." There was not even the faintest chance that she'd actually lead him to Jason; it was a simple tactic designed to keep him here, in the entryway, with his back turned to the stairs. She kept her eyes trained on his- determined not to give away her secret.

Jason was already on his way.

The code she'd entered hadn't been the regular entrance code but rather a special under-duress code that did unlock the door but had also triggered a silent warning to Jason.

She actually smiled a tiny little smile of relief when the man dropped to the ground in front of her, already dying from the wound caused by the knife Jason had dragged across his throat. Jason stepped on the man's wrist, picked up the gun, and handed it to the blood-splattered Nicky. "You okay?" She nodded. "We've gotta get out of here. Now. Where's your car?"

She answered with characteristic efficiency despite the shock of the last few minutes. "This side of the street twenty yards north." By the time she finished answering, she already had her keys out of her pocket and she handed them to Jason as he led her to the door, being careful to keep her behind him as he exited.

As they ran down the street towards the car, gunshots broke out behind them. He pulled her in front of him and changed course, propelling her down the dead end alley adjacent to his building and skidding to a stop beside a motorcycle he had stashed there. He put her on the bike and slid on behind her. It was awkward, trying to drive with her in front of him but he knew that he'd have to head north, away from those gunshots, and he wanted to be between her and the shooter.

He peeled out of the alleyway, his body leaning low over hers with his head looking over her left shoulder. "Keep your head down." he ordered as shots once again rang out from behind them. He angled the motorcycle to the right and cut the corner, running over the sidewalk. Now, with a building between them and the shooter, he changed course again, heading north, still intent on putting as much distance as possible between him and those men.

They had to be the Russians that he'd encountered in Moscow. He cursed himself for leading them to his home... to Nicky. His plan, developed even as he accelerated down the street, was to take Nicky to the nearest safe-house, give her the information he knew she'd insist on as quickly as he could, and then track down his attackers. He approached a roundabout and the buildings on either side of them opened up.

And that's when the sniper perched on nearby bridge took his shot.

The bullet was certainly meant for him. The sniper didn't care that Nicky was between him and his target. He would have aimed for Jason's head, but with Nicky in the way, he didn't have a clear shot; a bullet was unlikely to penetrate both of their skulls from this distance. So he aimed for Jason's heart. The bullet tore through her left shoulder and came to rest millimeters from his heart.

The impact almost threw them from the bike, but he had slowed down as he approached the intersection and was able to put his foot down and catch them. He didn't dare stop while the shooters behind them were certainly still following them. He clutched her tightly with his left arm, trying to put pressure on her wound, and sped away towards the safe house, indescribably relieved that it was so close. He could feel the blood soaking the clothes between them but he had no way of knowing how much of it was his and how much was hers.

He had managed to lose the shooters following them and he kept pressure on her would as he eased her off the bike and ditched it behind the house. She was able to walk, with assistance, to the door. But she collapsed on the floor of the kitchen as soon as they entered.

"I don't remember what happened next" she admitted.

* * *

Her part of the story was over but he picked it up where she left off.

He'd frantically rolled her over onto her side, cutting through her shirt to expose the exit wound he knew was there, desperately hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as he expected and relief had flooded though him at the sight of the wound. It had been a through-and-through. The exit was clean and smaller than he had any right to expect. Blood welled up, pouring out of the hole, but it wasn't arterial.

It was survivable.

He quickly grabbed the med kit stashed in the house and applied a pressure bandage to her wound without even bothering to assess his own. It wasn't serious, the bullet would have to come out, but he knew it hadn't reached his heart and he still had pretty much full range of motion so he ignored it for the time being.

The agency would be arriving soon; their unscheduled entrance to the safe house would not have gone unnoticed, so he held her hand and tried desperately to figure out how he'd explain this to Treadstone as he waited for them to arrive.

"What did I tell them?" he asked her but she just shook her head. "I have no clue but it must have been good. They never asked me about it."


End file.
